I had a meeting yesterday with two highly motivated entrepreneurs. They have a small brick-and-mortar store with a niche product in an underserved area, and their store is profitable and growing.

Last year, they got a quote from a friend of mine to build their new e-commerce site, but instead found someone else to build it for only $800. In the process, they saved themselves over $3,000. Pretty smart, don’t you think?

That is, until you consider the costs. In the meeting yesterday, they said they were very happy with their new website, except for a few minor issues:

(1) They are unable to edit any of the product descriptions without breaking the site.

(2) They have not yet gotten any sales from the website.

(3) The site does not show up in Google searches…even when you search on their name.

(4) Many of the pages take 30-90 seconds to load.

(5) Their web guy is no longer answering their phone calls or emails.

Considering their market opportunity, a website that was built correctly should be earning at least $5,000 a month for them. They said they would be happy to have $2,000 a month in online sales. In reality, their new site is COSTING THEM more than $20,000 per year in lost profits. How much of a bargain is that?

Last week someone came to me with yet another $50-a-month “SEO” program that they were considering buying. These always make me laugh and cry at the same time. Smart business owners who would never buy shares in the Brooklyn Bridge from a New York street hustler get suckered into these “SEO” programs all the time.

The fact is, real search engine optimization is hard work. It requires someone with experience and skill to spend a significant amount of time in order to get prospective customers to your website. As such, real SEO costs thousands (not tens) of dollars. Yet, when done right, SEO can provide a tremendous return on investment.

If someone on the street corner offered you a Rolex watch for a hundred dollars, there are only two possibilities: (a) it’s stolen, or (b) it’s fake. If someone offers you a hundred-dollar SEO program, the only two options are: (a) there’s no substance and it doesn’t work, or (b) they use some spam techniques that put your website at risk for getting banned from the search engines.

The next time someone offers you shares in the Brooklyn Bridge, or a ridiculously cheap SEO package, I hope you’ll know enough to run the other way.

Have you seen the ads lately offering to get you traffic to your website? For only $5, you can get 50 people to click through to your website.

Really? It’s amazing how these people confuse cause and effect. Of course, if you want your website to SELL MORE and get you more customers, you need more visitors to the site. But the converse isn’t necessarily true. Just because you have visitors, doesn’t mean you’re going to make money.

Now, don’t confuse this with a quality pay per click program like Google AdWords or Facebook Link Click ads, where you can pay per visitor to get potential customers onto your website. I’m talking about the programs where you’re essentially paying people to visit your site.

Imagine a marketing consultant offering to help a struggling grocery store, whose “help” consists of hiring people off the street at $2 each to wander through the store. Do you think that will increase sales?

Believe it or not, most of the time the 50 people that you paid to visit your site are in fact robots programmed to look like website visitors and fool your traffic logs.

Bottom line: Many programs promising to deliver a specific amount of traffic to your website are at best a waste of money.

There are, however, many high quality SEO programs and search engine marketing programs that can make your website much more visible and bring your potential customers to your site. Feel free to invest in one of these. We’ve helped clients double, triple, and quadruple their sales with simple SEO programs.

The same thing is true for some of the programs that promise you 10,000 Twitter followers for an insanely low price. Many fake Twitter accounts are set up to auto-follow back anyone who follows them. So for only $500, their Twitter robot can get 10,000 inactive user accounts (i.e., robots) to auto-follow you back. You can look like a celebrity if you have lots of people “following” you, but what good is having 10,000 so-called “followers” if they don’t read your stuff?

Or the package where you buy 200 likes on Facebook. In reality, this only hurts your Facebook campaigns, because now with 200 fake profiles following you, your engagement scores go way down and then Facebook won’t show your content to your legitimate followers either.

Now, just to clarify, I’m not talking about a Facebook ad campaign where you’re getting potential customers to like your page. That can be really effective. I’m talking about a package where you’re buying a certain number of likes.

If you’re going to do a Facebook campaign, be sure you’re working with a legitimate marketer who’s reaching out to people that can become customers.

When you’re running a Facebook ad campaign, here’s another thing to watch out for. As many as a third of the user profiles on Facebook are fake accounts being run by robots. If you advertise to them, and they start following you, it could lower your engagement scores, which gets you into a vicious cycle of having to spend more and more money just to get your content seen by legitimate users. You want your campaign run by someone who is setting up a good target audience, to make sure you’re advertising to real people, and getting real people to engage and follow you.

There are many canned SEO programs that provide content for you to automatically post on your website. The theory is that Google likes content, so if you put fresh content on your site every day, then your website is going to rank really well.

The thing that these programs don’t tell you is that Google likes unique content. They like original content and quality content. What Google doesn’t like is content that’s been posted on 500 other websites. In fact, your website ranking can go down if you’re posting a content feed that’s used everywhere else. So many of these canned SEO programs can make your website look active, but they’re likely to hurt your search engine ranking and limit the number of potential customers who will find you. In the long run, it can reduce your traffic and sales.

So do yourself a favor if you’re investing in a program to help your social media presence, or to help your website increase its ranking, be sure you’re investing with a legitimate marketer who knows what they are doing and who uses a quality program to actually get you real content, real engagement and real results.

Get Steve in your inbox

What peopleare saying

“I have benefited so much from my work with Steve. He is such a mixture of heart, talent, and incredible intelligence, that he gets you clarity with such rapidity and ease. On one particular session where I was rather down, I opened up to a rather personal and very raw space with him. He made me perfectly comfortable to share what I was thinking and feeling. And at the perfect time, using my experiences shared on previous sessions, he asked the perfect question that shifted everything. I would recommend Steve's coaching to help you with whatever you want to accomplish. Steve is the real deal! I would recommend him to anyone committed to improving their business, themselves and their lives.”

– Carla O'Brien
Founder, Coach Carla LLC

“Steve is an excellent coach. He has the ability to listen deeply, reflect honestly, ask challenging questions, and help clients view life from a new perspective....[Steve] helped me unwrap some unconscious limiting beliefs from long ago about money. For the first time I was able to see how I’d been limiting my business growth because of my discomfort with growing wealthy. Once I became aware of that belief I was free to make new choices. On to prosperity!...[Steve] is simply a great coach with outstanding listening skills.”

– Joan Hoedel, MA, RN, CPC
Blue Dragonfly Coaching, Missoula MT

“I’ve been working with Steve for the past four months, and on a scale from 1 to 10, his integrity is a 12. His professionalism and dedication are at the same level also.”